Landing sites from Kasenyi to Kiyindi are living with the new co-managed enforcement model. LivingWellUganda spent a week with fisher cooperatives, NaFIRRI researchers and district fisheries officers to see whether the reforms are landing.
By Moses Ekwaru..Wakiso, Buikwe & Mukono Districts.6 min read
Wakiso, Buikwe & Mukono Districts. 30 July 2025.
MixedEnvironment & Livelihoods
The second wave of Lake Victoria fisheries reform is neither a crackdown nor a return to the fully community-run beach management units of a decade ago. It sits somewhere in between: a co-management model run jointly by the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF), the National Fisheries Resources Research Institute (NaFIRRI) and reconstituted landing-site committees.
What is working
At Kasenyi and Kiyindi, cooperatives report a real drop in undersized Nile perch coming ashore since the tightened enforcement of net-mesh sizes. NaFIRRI biomass monitoring backs that up in the near-shore zones most easily patrolled.
What is not
Small-boat operators complain that enforcement is still uneven across the northern shore, and that seized illegal gear too often reappears within weeks. District fisheries officers, for their part, want a stable operating budget and predictable fuel budget for patrol boats - the recurring blind spot in every fisheries reform since 2015.
Field Dispatches
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One email a week from the Kampala, Busia, Hoima and Jinja desks. What we checked, what we saw at the site, and what is still not adding up.
The financing question behind enforcement
MAAIF officials admit that patrol-boat fuel budgets have historically been the weakest link in beach management unit enforcement, a budget line vulnerable to being cut first when ministry funding tightens. NaFIRRI's biomass monitoring, by contrast, is comparatively well resourced through donor-supported research funding, so the science behind the reform is more secure than the enforcement it is meant to inform.
Regional bodies including the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organization have pushed for harmonised enforcement standards across the three riparian states, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, arguing that unilateral Ugandan enforcement without matching action on the Kenyan and Tanzanian shores simply displaces illegal gear rather than eliminating it.
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A fisher who is stopped on our side just crosses the line. The lake does not respect a border the way our patrol boats have to.
Fisheries cooperative leader, Buikwe District
What is worth watching in the next reporting cycle is whether MAAIF secures a stable, ring-fenced fuel budget for patrol boats. Whether the three lvfo member states move toward the harmonised enforcement standard that officials on all three shores say is the only way the current gains hold.
Evidence & documents
Every claim above is checked against the records below. Open each one to see where it comes from.
01National Fisheries Resources Research Institute▾
